THEY used to run a scheme at Asda’s head office in Leeds called the Golden Cone Awards.
Staff, or “colleagues” as the supermarket likes to call them, voted for the most effective and popular team members who then were allowed to park in a space marked by a golden traffic cone right outside the front door of Asda HQ.
Don’t laugh, there were so many people working in the head office that the car park resembled the M25 on a bad day. Visitors to Asda were advised to stick their car in a public car park nearby.
I once went to interview the chief executive or “president” as Asda, owned by US giant Wal-Mart, likes to call the boss and got a slapped wrist for leaving my car in a golden cone space.
I quite enjoyed it.
Not the parking, the slap.
One thing is for sure: with the amount of redundancies Asda has made from its head office in the last couple of years I very much doubt that car parking is currently at a premium.
Last year the supermarket chain made about 750 redundancies at its headquarters and at the start of this month it announced another 288 job losses – about 10 per cent of the total number of staff working there.
For those of us who take a passing interest in the fortunes of the players in Britain’s highly competitive supermarket sector, this didn’t really come as any surprise.
In my opinion Asda has been sleepwalking towards this for years.
Under Archie Norman and Allan Leighton and several of their successors, the supermarket led the way with innovative approaches to marketing, public relations, advertising, product development and really looking after its staff.
But somewhere along the way it lost that.
Big time.
When it announced the latest redundancies a spokesman for the supermarket said: “At Asda we value each and every one of our colleagues. The changes are in response to the ever-changing sector in which we’re working and the need to adapt to create an agile business which is fit for the future.”
Give me a break.
Valuing colleagues? Most of the staff were marched out of the building on the afternoon they were told they were being dispensed with.
I remember a former member of staff, who worked in a relatively senior role at Asda telling me how he’d been virtually frog-marched out of the building with his possessions in a box after being told out of the blue that he was being made redundant after 15 years of loyal service.
If Asda once prided itself on looking after its people then it has now blown this idea out of the water.
But as I say, winter has been coming at Asda for several years.
Because Asda is owned by American group Wal-Mart, it has never needed to publish full sales or financial figures but the yearly updates by former chief executive Andy Clarke were a succession of downbeat statements that constantly harped on about the pressures on the supermarket from European upstarts like Aldi and Lidl.
I saw him give a speech to the annual dinner of Leeds Chamber of Commerce – back when a chamber of commerce event was worth going to – and the first thing Clarke did was ask his audience of 500 business leaders how many of them shopped at Asda.
About six put their hands up.
I was embarrassed for him but couldn’t believe he – and his retinue of well paid advisers – had thought that business people would shop at Asda, or even if they did, admit to it in front of their peers.
It smacked of someone who hadn’t done his homework and the succession of poor results from Asda showed that he wasn’t getting to grips with the major challenges it faced.
The shareholders of a stock market quoted supermarket like Morrisons, Sainsbury’s or Tesco would never have put up with a constant diet of negative news but Wal-Mart did nothing for six years until Clarke was replaced in the summer of 2016 by Sean Clarke, who is no relation but who had worked at Asda before going on to run Wal-Mart’s Chinese business.
Andy Clarke apparently continued to act as an adviser to Asda until the end of last year but with his record I very much doubt there were many calls for advice from Asda’s HQ in Leeds to his holiday home in the South of France.
Yes the grocery sector in the UK is one of the most competitive and cut-throat in world retailing. Customers, faced with loads of deals and the attraction of Aldi and Lidl, can no longer be relied on for loyalty.
But don’t tell me that this makes success impossible.
Only yesterday Morrisons, the UK’s fourth-biggest supermarket chain, reported rising sales and profits for the first half of the year.
Like-for-like sales were up 3% for the six months to 30 July, while underlying profit was up almost 13% at £177m.
After the turbulence caused by the rabbit-in-the-headlights leadership of Dalton Philips, new chief executive David Potts has started to turn the Bradford-based business around by focusing on a combination of innovation and what made it special in the first place.
Quality, fresh food, well laid out stores, staff that care and can communicate were some of the mantras of the late Sir Ken Morrison.
Under Potts Morrisons has got back to that and it recently signed a deal to become the UK wholesale supplier to convenience store chain McColls and also formed a tie-up with Amazon and has invested in its range of “premium” products.
Potts isn’t jumping the gun, he says the turnaround strategy is ongoing and a “new Morrisons is beginning to take shape”.
The last “innovation” I saw by Asda was it bringing in celebrity chef James Martin to appear in its TV adverts.
I’ve not seen him in one of those recently.
Asda is reacting to its woes in the same way that all the groups in my old world of newspapers have done.
In response to falling sales they cut head count to stop margins being squeezed.
But they lack innovation to arrest those sales falls.
Eventually you get to the point where there are no longer any more jobs to be cut but sales keep on falling.
And where do you go then?
If Asda isn’t careful it will find out pretty soon.
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FAREWELL then Frank Vincent, the American actor who made a name for himself playing gangsters.
A smile from Vincent was about as warm and welcoming as a stiletto between the shoulder blades.
He played a mob boss in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 classic Raging Bull alongside Robert De Niro and his long-time friend Joe Pesci.
In fact Pesci and Vincent took turns to top one another in two more Scorsese successes: Goodfellas and Casino.
In the former Pesci stabbed Vincent, who played mafia rival Billy Batts, in a frenzied attack, while in Casino, Vincent, as Pesci’s right hand man, does the dirty on his boss and batters him with a baseball bat in the middle of a cornfield.
In the long-running US TV drama, The Sopranos, Vincent played Tony Soprano’s nemesis, Phil Leotardo and was the last person to be killed in the final episode of the show.
He is shot at a petrol station after getting out of a car and waving goodbye to his wife and baby grandchildren. In a flourish that made The Sopranos one of the most memorable series in TV history, his wife panics and her car rolls over his head.
Happy memories.
Have a great weekend.